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Empire and Allegory in Henry James's The Europeans

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 October 2010

KIM VANDERLAAN
KIM VANDERLAAN
Affiliation:
Louisiana Tech University. Email: [email protected].
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Abstract

My article argues for reading the novel as political allegory. America's efforts in the early and mid-nineteenth century are represented by Robert Acton trying to compete with a “European family” for international colonizing privileges. A blend of British and French empire can be seen in the person of Eugenia, the Baroness Munster – originally American by birth, who has, though her years as European nobility, adopted the policy of expansionism. To fully understand James's caustic comment on imperialistic ventures – most notably as he pits the pernicious nature of European exploits against the more humanistic pursuit of art for art's sake – we can read Eugenia's brother, Felix, as a proponent of aestheticism, committed to seeking beauty in all life pursuits. In sum, I suggest that the novel need not be dismissed (as it largely has been for so many decades) as a simplistic, insignificant part of James's oeuvre. I use historical research, literary analyses of other scholars, statements made by James in his letters, and critical statements by James in such commentaries as his biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne in order to support my views. Of course, I use the primary text, The Europeans, for much of my support.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 45 , Issue 1 , February 2011 , pp. 39 - 51
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

1 Henry James, Selected Letters, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge: Belknap, 1987), 219.

2 Bell, Ian F. A., “Sincerity and Performance in The Europeans,” Modern Philology (Nov. 1990), 126–46Google Scholar, 127.

3 Quoted in Tony Tanner, “Introduction” to Henry James, Hawthorne, ed. Tony Tanner (London: Macmillan, 1967).

4 Henry James, A Life in Letters, ed. Philip Horne (London: Penguin Books, 1999), 83. Murray, Donald, in his article, “Henry James and the English Reviewers, 1882–1890,” American Literature, 24, 1, (1952), 1–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 1, asserts that when “Macmillan and Company accepted The Europeans he wrote to them that even if the profits were only moderate, the book ‘will be the beginning of my appearance before the British public as the novelist of the future, destined to extract from the B.P. eventually … a colossal fortune’.” We have no way of knowing if James was in fact confident of earning money, or if this was meant to instill confidence for his publisher, or if it was simply wishful thinking.

5 James, A Life in Letters, 84.

6 Harry B. Henderson III, Versions of the Past: The Historical Imagination in American Fiction (New York and Oxford, 1974), 212, quoted in Bell, 133.

7 James's critical study of Hawthorne was published in America at the end of 1779, and, of course, The Europeans was published just months earlier.

8 Hawthorne, for instance, inserted “parable” beneath his short story, “The Minister's Black-Veil” to imply that there was an implicit moral to be gained. Incidentally, “Daisy Miller” (a story written during the same time period), was subtitled “A Study.” Both subtitles, like Hawthorne's, underline the stories' symbolic, or allegorical, nature.

9 James, Hawthorne, 142.

10 Ibid., 127.

11 Quoted in Pancost, David W., “Henry James and Julian Hawthorne,” American Literature, 50, 3, (1978), 461–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 461.

12 James, Hawthorne 142.

13 The term “art for art's sake” is sometimes used synonymously with aestheticism, a term applied to a particular view of the place and value of art, especially in the nineteenth century. Both terms imply that appreciation of works of art requires “no justification by reference to anything outside” that particular work of art (Ted Honderich, ed., Oxford Companion to Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 8). This approach to art can be viewed as “independent of any motivations to do with utility, economic value, moral judgment, or peculiarly personal emotion” (ibid.). Such a theory, which seeks to experience the object for its own intrinsic value, involves the idea that “certain kinds of response [to art] are privileged, others discountable on the grounds that they fail to take the ‘correct’ attitude toward the object concerned” (ibid.).

14 See Tony Tanner, “Introduction” to the Penguin edition of The Europeans (New York: Penguin Classics, 1985); and Richard Poirier's “Afterword” in the Signet edition (New York, 1964).

15 Henry James, The Europeans (Penguin Classics 1985 edition), 43. References are hereafter given parenthetically in text.

16 Kalupahana, Chamika, “‘Les beaux jours sont passés’: Staging Whiteness and Postcolonial Ambivalence in The Europeans by Henry James,” Canadian Review of American Studies, 33, 2, (2003), 119–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 119.

17 “Empire” is defined (in the Oxford English Dictionary) as “supreme and extensive political dominion” and (further down in the entries) “[p]aramount influence, absolute sway, supreme command or control.” Empire can also be defined as “an extensive territory (esp. an aggregate of many separate states) under the sway of an emperor or supreme ruler … or a sovereign state” (OED). It is worth noting that the “default” definition for “empire” is “the British Empire, first recorded 1722 … [which] devolved into The Commonwealth in 1931” (Dictionary.com). James's story, of course, takes place in the very center of this time frame.

18 OED. “Eugenia” is also the name (from modern Latin) that was given in 1729 by Micheli in honor of Eugene, Prince of Savoy. On the opposite end of this spectrum (from royal status to toxic substance), “eugenic acid” is the “oxidized essence of cloves” (OED).

19 Jean Bond Rafferty, “Elegant Domain,” France Today, Jan. 2008, 21–24, 21.

20 Ibid.

21 Also from the OED. One ironic reading of her name comes from the root “to produce” or “pertaining to the production of fine offspring.” Eugenia does not have children, and she does not seem to care for “creating” in artistic terms either.

22 Hannah, Daniel, “Ornamental Pleasure: James and the British Soldier,” Henry James Review, 31, 1 (Winter 2010), 32–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 34.

23 Ibid.

24 Kumar, Krishan, “English and French National Identity: Comparisons and Contrasts,” Nations and Nationalism 12, 3, (2006), 413–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 419.

25 James, A Life in Letters, 49.

26 Ibid., 49, notes.

27 Ibid., 49.

28 James, Selected Letters, 164.

29 Heinz Gollwitzer, Europe in the Age of Imperialism: 1880–1914 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1969), 18.

30 Leonard Krieger, “Nationalism and the Nation-State System,” in Chapters in Western Civilization, Volume II, 3rd edn (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), 130.

31 Nicholas Mansergh, “Imperialism: The Years of European Ascendancy,” in Chapters in Western Civilization, Volume II, 3rd edn (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), 401.

32 Ibid.

33 Quoted in ibid., 409.

34 Quoted in ibid., 407.

35 John K. Fairbank, Edwin O. Reischauer, and Albert M. Craig, East Asia: The Modern Transformation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1965), 169.

36 Ibid., 171.

37 Baudrillard summarizes his basic argument about the cycle of consumer society which inevitably ends in the destruction of the very entity produced in three essays: “Consumer Society,” “The Mirror of Production,” and “Symbolic Exchange and Death” (see Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988)). Baudrillard's simplest explanation for the complex dynamic I suggest between Eugenia and Acton can be summarized in the first. He writes, “The whole discourse on consumption [can be] articulated on the mythological discourse of a fable: a man, ‘endowed’ with needs which ‘direct’ him towards objects that ‘give’ him satisfaction. Since man is really never satisfied (for which, by the way, he is reproached), the same history is repeated indefinitely” (35–36). Baudrillard writes that seduction “is that which extracts meaning from discourse and detracts it from the truth” (149). The discourse between Eugenia and Acton extracts several layers of meaning, while simultaneously detracting both parties from the truth of their personal (politicized) agendas. Eugenia desires to possess his house and Acton desires possession of Eugenia, in bodily form – but only as he might display his vases and only, therefore, as an artificial (and therefore dead) object. He intuitively understands that such transient commercial intercourse could not be sustained in marriage. Baudrillard is cited in a similar context in Bell, “Sincerity and Performance,” 126.

38 Baudrillard, “Consumer Society,” 149.

39 Mansergh, 402.

40 See, in particular, Chamika Kalupahana's argument that Eugenia's features indicate the presence of “black blood.” Kalupahana, 121.

41 Fairbank, Reischauer, and Craig, 66.

42 For a more thorough discussion of James's relationship with and knowledge of the Orientalists, see Tintner, Adeline R., “Henry James, Orientalist,” Modern Language Studies, 13, 4, (1983), 121–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43 See James, The Europeans, 196.

44 John LaFarge, a friend of James, said that James had a painter's eye, implying that he could discern an appropriate subject matter as much as indicating that he could judge visual art according to an accurate index of quality.

45 Napoleon I obtained an annulment from the Empress Josephine after thirteen years of a childless marriage. She was also noted for her “charm, her scheming, and her sexual promiscuity” (notes from James, The Europeans, 199).

46 Davidson, Guy, “Ornamental Identity: Commodity Fetishism, Masculinity, and Sexuality in The Golden Bowl,” Henry James Review, 28, 1, (2007), 26–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 26.

47 Ward, J. A., “James's The Europeans and the Structure of Comedy,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 19, 1, (1964), 1–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 1, reads the novel as “essentially a comic novel,” with its “careful balancing and juxtaposition of character types, and the rigorously logical progression of events (rendered scenically) to an inevitable conclusion.” Julian Hawthorne (the son of Nathaniel Hawthorne) received The Europeans on 17 Jan. 1879, and three days later declared it “entertaining.” (See James, A Life in Letters, 100, note).

48 James, A Life in Letters, 101.

49 Ibid., 101.

50 Henry James, The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces, with an introduction by Richard Blackmur (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1962), 34.

51 James, A Life in Letters 53.